Statistical Analysis of the Dearth of Super-eccentric Jupiters in the Kepler Sample

Abstract

Hot Jupiters may have formed in situ, or been delivered to their observed short periods through one of two categories of migration mechanisms: disk migration or high-eccentricity migration. If hot Jupiters were delivered by high-eccentricity migration, we would expect to observe some “super-eccentric” Jupiters in the process of migrating. We update a prediction for the number of super-eccentric Jupiters we would expect to observe in the Kepler sample if all hot Jupiters migrated through high-eccentricity migration and estimate the true number observed by Kepler. We find that the observations fail to match the prediction from high-eccentricity migration with 94.3% confidence and show that high-eccentricity migration can account for at most ∼62% of the hot Jupiters discovered by Kepler.

Keywords

• Transit photometry
• Exoplanet migration
• Exoplanets
• Star-planet interactions
• Exoplanet dynamics
• Hot Jupiters